Saturday, April 10, 2010

Turns out I can totally backdate these.

Good morning. I went swimming today. It was fun, but I ate too much pizza last night so I felt kind of ill afterward. Woah hold on. I just saw a commercial for a scooter with a swivel wheel. Woah. Man. Woah, here’s a commercial about reading the serving size on the food you eat.

What the fuck? Being a kid these days is weird.

But this super hero super squad show is great! It’s condensing all of those complex and horrible plotlines in the comics to a sort of nice summary. They’ve got all sorts of stuff just in this episode. Skrulls, the super-skrull, hulk and things weird animosity, fucking thanos and his infinity gauntlet, which appears not to be as great as it usually is. “zounds! My symbolic tool of righteous aggression!” Out of thor losing his hammer (which is also symbolic for a penis, aww yeah)

Oh hey check it out. The same commercial for zoobooks they had on like fucking 12 years ago when I was a kid. I remember zoobooks. I had a ton.

Oh god. The skrull invasion plan was on a facebook page.

Oh god.

I think I’m in love.

Oh, I see. Thanos was really a skrull. Explains the lack of ULTIMATE UNIVERSE DESTROYING POWER. “it makes string cheese. For all their advances, the skrulls were never able to make string cheese. String theorists would make a fortune from this tube.”

Oh man. That was so great.

Anyway, yeah being a kid is hella weird these days. Like there are so many things that companies are expected to push on you to keep you healthy. Responsibility for this thing has shifted largely from parents to the entertainment companies that sell things to parents for their kids. Why? Cause parents have money. also corporations are evil. Evil like taxes. Anyway so you grow up being told on the tv “go outside and jump around and do stuff. Stop watching tv” and you end up largely ignoring it cause what the fuck, you’re watching tv. God damn. If I wanted to be outside I would be outside.

Though, I guess it’s not really new. The spinach industry totally ran the popeye comic. If you learn nothing from it, you learn that hamburgers hake you fat and worthless and that spinach makes you beat up dudes you don’t like. Maybe I’m just being silly. I just get kind of annoyed when videogames ask me to take a break like once an hour. God damn, what happened to free enjoyment of the media I’m consuming? By George, I am going to write a book one of these days that between every chapter says “Get up and go outside and meet people, you horrible shut-in. This book will do nothing to help your life.” That way irate readers can’t sue me when they realize they’ve wasted their life reading a series of cheap starcrafty knockoffs (I’ll call them “Spacewar: the final war in space.” The first novel will be subtitled “the obscure threat” or “fighting advanced”) and become horrible neckbeards who spend their lives fapping to ships of the hot three titted alien bimbo chick and the shy nerdy girl with the glasses that maintains the space library.

Man, the other day I was at a borders wandering around and not buying things (pfft, paying for books. That’s what libraries are for. I have been not paying for things long before napster or any of that shiz) and I wandered into their study section. So that got me to thinking. There are absolutely hundreds of books in this section, right? There are all these books on. Passing all manner of tests: GREs, LSATS, AP courses, and so on. It got me to thinking how weird this was, that there’s an entire cottage industry of helping people pass these tests that are supposed to be indicative of how much a person has learned or exactly how smart they really are. So instead these tests become not about how smart a person is, but how much money they spent on study books, or how well they absorb these study books. What the hell is up with that? AP courses especially. They’re supposed to be something for students who find their regular classes mindlessly dull (*cough*) to look forward to, because they’re all college and at a higher level. Then the AP tests started counting for college credit (or maybe they always did. Dunno) and it became an important part of an achiever’s job to get a 5 on the tests so that they can secure an early start for their future college careers. Fuck the achievers man. They don’t give a shit about the material. Seriously, you talk to them. They have no passion beyond scoring that A. They treat school like a job.

And school is a job these days. Kids go to school to learn valuable knowledge for their future careers. It says so right on the mission statements of most high schools. That’s also fucked up. Why does a high school have a mission statement? No wonder everyone hates it. You don’t go to school to learn about the world around you. You go to school to pass a test and get a job that pays you money so you can afford to have kids and pass on your genes. School is just a means to an end, and that end is your inevitable death. If you’re lucky, your kids will have done well in their schools so they can afford to support you on top of their families and you die comfortably in a nice rest home.

“oh no, that is not me” you think. “I am destined for something much more fascinating and also I never want kids or to get married.” Ha. Ha. Ha. You don’t think that millions of other people don’t also think the exact same way? Simple economics and statistics dictate that your dream is foolish and irresponsible and simply not likely. What’s all the worse to me, is that these delusions are inevitable in an environment like this. You spend your childhood growing up and watching cool kids and cool people on tv and in movies doing awesome things and you decide that you also want to be cool and awesome and that eventually through sheer moxie or something, you too will obtain the coolness of these tv and movie people. Yes.